Release Date: 12 January 1999
Label: Naxos - Nxc / Naxos Classics
Packaging Type: Jewel Case
No of Units: 1
Barcode: 730099586825
Genres: Classical
Composer/Series: BARTOK
Description
Béla Bartók (1881 - 1945) Sonata for Solo Violin, Sz 117 44 Duos for Two Violins The Hungarian composer Béla Bartók was born in 1881 in an area that now forms part of Romania. His father, director of an agricultural college, was a keen amateur musician, while it was from his mother that he received his early piano lessons. The death of his father in 1889 led to a less settled existence, as his mother resumed work as a teacher, eventually settling in the Slovak capital of Bratislava (the Hungarian Pozsony), where Bartók passed his early adolescence, counting among his school-fellows the composer Erno Dohnányi. Offered the chance of musical training in Vienna, like Dohnányi he chose instead Budapest, where he won a considerable reputation as a pianist, being appointed to the teaching staff of the Academy of Music in 1907. At the same time he developed a deep interest, shared with his compatriot Zoltan Kodály, in the folk-music of his own and adjacent countries, later extended as far as Anatolia, where he collaborated in research with the Turkish composer Adnan saygiin. As a composer Bartók found acceptance much more difficult, particularly in his own country, which was, in any case, beset by political troubles, when the brief post-war left-wing government of Béla Kun was replaced by the reactionary regime of Admiral Horthy. Meanwhile his reputation abroad grew, particularly among those with an interest in contemporary music, and his success both as a pianist and as a composer, coupled with dissatisfaction at the growing association between the Horthy government and National Socialist Germany, led him in 1940 to emigrate to the United States of America. In his last years, after briefly held teaching appointments at Columbia and Harvard, Bartók suffered from increasing ill-health, and from poverty which the conditions of exile in war-time could do nothing to alleviate. He died in straitened circumstances in 1945, leaving a new Viola Concerto incomplete and a Third Piano Concerto more nearly finished. The years in America, whatever difficulties they brought, also gave rise to other important compositions, including the Concerto for Orchestra, commissioned by the Koussevitzky Foundation, a sonata for solo Violin for Yehudi Menuhin and, in the year before he left Hungary, Contrasts, for Szigeti and Benny Goodman. The Sonata for solo violin was commissioned by Yehudi Menuhin, to whom it was dedicated and who gave the first performance in New York on 26th November 1944. It is an immensely challenging work, making great demands on both the performer and the listener. The first movement, marked Tempo di ciaccona is essentially a sonata-form movement, with something of the character of a chaconne but not its form. The opening chord may suggest the Bach sonata in G minor for unaccompanied violin, although what follows is very different, with its exploration of intervals generally ass
Tracklisting
Dariia Lytvishko
Baltimore Symphony Orchestra; Marin Alsop
Alice Di Piazza; Basel Sinfonietta; NDR Bigband; Titus Engel
Anna Alas i Jove; Miquel Villalba
David Childs; Black Dyke Band; Nicholas Childs
Grazer Philharmoniker
Zenz:Cathariou:Iacovidou
Zahir Ensemble
